Amateur musicians should eventually be able to use similar technology to create entire songs using only a vocal melody and an idea of which band — or mix of bands — would sound right playing the accompaniment. Want a backing track for your “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” cover that sounds like a mix of Radiohead and Green Day? Soon, you could be able to click a button and make it so.

Pretty cool stuff… the program will take songs you “feed” it from a particular artist and become that band in style – they call it “Automatic Style Specific Accompaniment” or ASSA. You can see this in action in this video which shows the ASSA success rate of 82% in coming up with the melod of Creep by Radiohead after being given 3 of the band’s songs (High and Dry, Fake Plastic Trees and Airbag).

Who knows, eventually an artist/songwriter may license their “style” under ASSA? Will you be able to copyright a style? I guess if it can be analyzed and stripped to such a point that it can be copied and utilized to another songwriter’s benefit, the answer may be “Why not?”.

Right now the system is bits and bytes and MIDI-based, but theoretically, it should work on audio files as well in the future. As the author states in the article: “If all you need is a melody, lyrics and a concept of which band or bands you want your accompaniment to resemble, the bar to songwriting will be lowered.”

Peter Neubacker, the music software engineer behind Melodyne, is interviewed online on the Celemony website here and I hope you take the time to take a look.

It’s really quite incredible what his invention within Melodyne, Direct Note Access (DNA), has done for polyphonic sounds (i.e. guitar/piano chords). It allows the user to take individual notes within that polyphonic sound and “play” with them (pitch/decay/timing, etc…) – see image at end of post.

While Melodyne enabled anyone to sing in tune, Direct Note Access’ effect will likely be far more widespread. Any one of us will technically be able to create a guitar-based song by strumming all of the open strings on a guitar then editing the resulting chord to play whatever we want. Talk about your democratizing technology.

Celemony’s Direct Note Access will likely lead to a revolution in how music is made, although purists are likely to scoff at yet another technology that downgrades the importance of virtuosic talent. Others will surely see this as a natural progression in the ongoing musical fusion of human and machine.

Remember to check out that demonstration (very cool)! And may the technological Muse be with you too…